Globalization + Graphic Design

Final Experiment

jamesbarela — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:10:13 +0000

Click here to see my final experiment, “Passport to cross cultural branding”

Last bit of inspiration

jamesbarela — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:13 +0000

It’s about seeing a brand in a different context wether it be through an artistic portrayal or through different languages, like what I’ve focused on for the past few weeks.

jamesbarela — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:00:53 +0000

The help I’ve received with translations and explanations about their native tongues has been absolutely wonderful. In addition to many conversations regarding Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, among others, and many exchanged emails about Arabic, I have a few diagram markups from some people that helped me. I thought they were interesting and are an essential part of the process. Here’s a few.

Korean help

Thai help

Mandarin help

upclose Thai help

The transliterations

jamesbarela — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:38:14 +0000

A sneak peek to my passport book about the process of designing in other languages using Coca-Cola as an example. I’m thinking an accordion style so it can be spread fully out and seen in its entirety. Or maybe I could just put the whole thing on my blog?

Examples of what I’m studying (some very unfinished obviously):

McD

jamesbarela — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:28:46 +0000

Updating my blog here and there with work. Here is the McDonald’s mess I made overlapping the web pages of regional sites. I wanted to see if there were any common themes… and there wasn’t anything too obvious besides the repetition of the golden arches. Identity is key after all.

Update

jamesbarela — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:54:26 +0000

Multilingual Coca Cola. Currently working on a visualization for this in the dimensions of a passport.

English– Coca-Cola

Arabic– كوكاكول

Korean–코카콜라

Marathi–कोका-कोला

Japanese–コカ・コーラ

Chinese–可口可樂

Russian–Кока-Кола

Greek–Κόκα κόλα

Project Shift

jamesbarela — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:40:19 +0000

My project has now switched to producing a guide or “atlas” on international branding by using Coca-Cola as a case study. Focus is primarily on multilingual design. Interesting stuff! Now to see it to the end!

Massive sites

jamesbarela — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:43:16 +0000

If you go to the McDonalds Japan site, your computer may crash. In fact, their site is so jam packed with flash animations and music and just intense stimuli that my quite quick internet connection couldn’t handle it. There has to be a correlation between the tons of data the McDonalds Japan website and the internet users of Japan. I did some research and found a list of the top 10 countries with the highest internet download speed. Here it is:

1. South Korea 16,765 kb/s
2. Japan 16,465 kb/s
3. Lithuania 11,240 kb/s
4. Sweden 11,081 kb/s
5. Romania 9,875 kb/s
6. Latvian 9,591 kb/s
7. Bulgaria 8,885 kb/s
8. Netherlands 8,586 kb/s
9. Germany 7,346 kb/s
10. Russian Federation 7,138 kb/s

Most westernized countries aren’t featured prominantly.

In addition, try to open McDonalds South Korea link and your computer will most likely lag. Web designers design their websites with connections speed in mind as well, and need to understand what speed is available in their respective countries. Globalized web design does not work. But now… how do I SHOW this correlation? Massive site = Less of Swiss style influence.

Hindi characters intermixed with Roman/Latin characters

jamesbarela — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:26:36 +0000

Here is a great example of Roman characters (and Western influence) mirroring a culture’s typographical style for an altogether different language and set of characters.

Hindi Characters

When considering international design…

jamesbarela — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:16:55 +0000

“The language barrier is the first obstacle to overcome. Western languages codify words in written script whereas each Chinese character represents a word. So any brand moving into China has to decide how it will be rendered in Chinese–both phonetically and visually.”

Coke China